When the telephone call is received while viewing or listening to a television broadcast program, the viewer usually must stop viewing the program, lower the volume, and handle the telephone call. The program therefore cannot be viewed or heard during the telephone call or communication. To eliminate this inconvenience methods have been proposed for automatically recording the broadcast television program when a telephone call is received.
A method is disclosed in JP-A No. 333334/2001 for automatically recording a currently viewed television program when an incoming call to a fixed telephone is detected on a television receiver with an internal modem. In this document, a communication antenna is installed on the television receiver and when an incoming call to a cellular telephone is detected, the current viewed broadcast television program is recorded.
When a telephone call is received while using a home electrical appliance, usually the electrical appliance must be stopped or the power turned off and the telephone call then taken. When the telephone call ends, the user then returns switches on the electrical appliances to their original (on) positions. To eliminate this inconvenience, methods have been proposed to automatically turn off the switches of home electrical appliances currently in use when a telephone call is received.
A method is disclosed in JP-A No. 27142/2002 for temporarily turning off electrical appliances automatically or outputting a signal to turn off the power from the telephone, when a telephone call is received while home electrical appliances are in use. This method of the related art in this way eliminates tasks such as turning off currently used electrical appliances until the incoming telephone call is handled.
In recent years, a remarkable amount of progress has been made in the functions contained in mobile communications devices including portable information terminals such as cellular telephones, PHS (Personal Handy-Phone System), and PDA (Personal Digital Assistants) having card communication functions. In addition to communication functions, these mobile communication devices are also capable of receiving television (hereafter simply abbreviated to TV) broadcasts such as ground wave digital broadcasts.
Utilizing mobile communication devices also makes possible services over the Internet such as operating recording equipment in one's own home, and services for recording, playback, or distribution of TV programs.
One example of a service system using these types of mobile communication devices is the following system.
In a TV program scheduling system disclosed in JP-A No. 238157/2001, the user makes use of a portable information terminal (mobile communication device) to set a particular program for recording on a program scheduling server that schedules the recording on a user home video server.
Further, a TV broadcast recording re-distribution system disclosed in JP-A No. 185900/2002 allows receiving a recording re-distribution service for TV broadcasts on a portable information terminal (mobile communication device) by utilizing a TV broadcast recording redistribution station.
However, in the technology of the related art disclosed in JP-A No. 333334/2001 and JP-A No. 27142/2002, the recording is stopped after the telephone call ends but playing back the recording must be performed manually. There are also no countermeasures when receiving of the TV broadcast radio waves is disabled due to radio wave difficulties.
The program scheduling system disclosed in JP-A No. 238157/2001 required connecting the home video server to the program scheduling server over public telephone lines by a portable information server. The task of setting the program to be recorded on the program scheduling server is also necessary.
Therefore, a problem occurred with this technology when setting a program for recording on the program scheduling server on the portable information terminal. More specifically, when a telephone call or communication is received, or the portable information terminal is subjected to radio wave difficulties, or batteries on the portable information terminal itself were low, the user is then unable to set the program for recording on the program scheduling server and therefore missed viewing the desired program.
In the TV broadcast re-distribution system disclosed in JP-A No. 185900/2002 the program reception on the information terminal is promptly cut off when a telephone call is received, or when radio wave difficulties occurred in the information communication terminal. This technology therefore had the problem that user is required to memorize what program is missed each time and time is required to search for the desired program for viewing.